Hello Slackware, our old friend: Veteran Linux distribution releases version 15.0 at last It's been a long time coming but version 15 of Slackware finally showed up at the weekend. Fans of the distro, which debuted in 1993, have waited since 2016's 14.2 for the full fat update. Now, nearly a year after the beta turned up, "the Slackhog emerged from its development den, did *not* see its shadow, and Slackware 15.0 …
You and your fancy modern Postfix! Back in my day we wrote sendmail.cf files by hand and sent email crafted in telnet sessions. If anyone complained we'd beat them around the head with the complete Sendmail reference manual. I can't even see a way to download Slackware via Kermit - what is wrong with the world?!
Umm...it may have been intended as a joke. i don't know. However I have written quite a few sendmail.cf by hand. Admittedly not so much in last few years, but back "then" that was the only way.
I suspect a few people would be surprised what can be achieved with sendmail.cf if you have half a clue of what you are doing.
I've had a chat with Eric the author of sendmail and even he admits that he screwed up the design of the language for the sendmail.cf file. He should have made it more human readable, but instead he optimized it for being readable by the machine instead. Oops.
I had an old boss and co-worker who were wizards at sendmail, we ran beta versions in production all the time and fixed bugs and added stuff while supporting the Uni. Impressive.
Me, I'm a postfix fan nowdays, I've been expunging sendmail where ever I find it because even with the m4 macros and the new config language,it's still ugly and painful.
The sins of legacy support and papering over of bad design decisions way in the past.... sometimes it really is better to take it out back and put it out of it's misery.
"I suspect a few people would be surprised what can be achieved with sendmail.cf if you have half a clue of what you are doing."
Very true. It's Turing complete ... so I once wrote a C compiler in it, just to prove to myself that I could do it. I don't recommend anyone actually use the kludge, though.
I suspect a few people would be surprised what can be achieved with sendmail.cf if you have half a clue of what you are doing.
You can even limit email to 500 miles ;)
I suspect a few people would be surprised what can be achieved with sendmail.cf if you have half a clue of what you are doing
For my sins, I spent two years doing Unix and Network admin on Solaris.. and we used sendmail extensively.. We didn't need anything too extreme out of the sendmail.cf but I do remember breaking it quite a bit in the early months..
> with the complete Sendmail reference manual
You had a sendmail reference manual. Bloody luxury
When I first came across it you had learn at the feet of the upstream gateway admin whilst he simultaneously tried to rip your head off down the phone coz your box wasn't handling things properly.
Me, I never bothered to learn this M4 macro stuff once I'd been beaten within an inch of my life I never had another problem writing cf files and spent many happy years teaching it to people. The language wasn't too bad, the crazy bit was the order it ran the rulesets in :-).
I always just assumed that Eric was obsessed with $$$$$$ like most poor students.
...Pat and team. Slackware was the first distro I used around 25yrs ago and still what I use on my own kit. At customer sites have had to install other flavours for various reasons over the years, but I stick with Slack. A now very raggy penguin still sits on my monitor too, still smoking his pipe.
Just raising one to both of you.
Same, same: first dive into Linux was building from scratch the source downloaded via our blazing corporate 128kbps. The came Slackware as my first distro, which I ran for years.Heck, I don't think I touched Redhat or SUSE until the Noughts.
I did it on a Mac, as they were the only computers at university that had mostly unfettered internet access. (The SPARC machines were run by the (teaching) IT Department, and they blocked general internet access. The Macs were 'general-use' computers run by the University's IT managment unit, so had much freerer access to the internet).
And let me tell you, it takes a long time for a Mac to write to an MS-DOS formatted 1.44MB floppy disk, approaching 10 minutes per floppy.
It was bad enough when it was a 20-floppy download. 50-floppy ones were a nightmare, especially when the 47th floppy is corrupted, which you only find out during install after you've already inserted 1-46, and put in 47 "Error, Retry, Fail" appears on the screen.
I was a late starter - autumn '97 downloaded via ftp. Took all afternoon to get the A and N disks. The next day I treated myself to the D and X and apps ones. Then the token ring driver wouldn't work. On the plus side I did work out how to wire IBM type 1 to pass 10-base-T Ethernet. That's the thing about this level of engagement - you learn all about the tech you use.
Also mine. Didn't have an internet connection but a friend did. He downloaded the images to 3.5" floppy for me, I started the install.
Floppy 5 was corrupt - he re-downloaded it and copied to a new floppy. Floppy 8 was corrupt, rinse and repeat for about 3 more floppies.
Eventually had a working linux setup (including dial-on-demand to Demon (they had a FAQ on how to do it - one of the reasons why I picked them) then managed to damage it severely with a poorly crafted rm command (turns out that putting a space in between a / and tmp is a *bad* idea). Salvaged enough to rebuild a fresh build without having to reconfigure everything.
That was Slackware pre-version 1 (0.99 pl (15?) I think - it was SLS at that point). Used it for a number of years then 'upgraded' to Mandrake because it was better at the GUI stuff and I was using it as my main home PC.
Compiling the Linux kernel on my home 386SX16 with a then largeish 8 megs of RAM took over a day in about mid 1993. It took me six tries to get it right. The end result increased my system's performance by about 3% ... I just used the stock Slackware kernel for several years after that. Seemed to be the pragmatic thing to do.
my home 386SX16
Mine was a 386sx25 (4 mb RAM, 80 MB hard drive). Hard drive was later upgraded (thanks to a local computer fair) to a massive 330 MB ESDI drive (full height, full noise, full heat :-) that I bought with the requisite interface card which, fortunately, linux supported.
That machine lived for many years as my mail server (initially sendmail, then I discovered qmail).
My current linux mail server still uses qmail but, I suspect, not for much longer.
I'm pretty sure my "first time" involved a Computer Shopper CD, but maybe it was downloaded. I know I had Internet access 25yrs ago. It probably wasn't anything Linux-y I was downloading at the time, but I'll pretend it was to keep on-topic.
Huge download, pay per minute Internet access (pre-0800), was going at least 12hrs then dropped. The phone then rang saying my aunty had been trying to call but the line had been engaged so she thought there was a fault. She'd rang 100 for the operator (are those guys still around?) who must've done some test on the line causing the drop, then rang through.
A costly session with zero at the end of it. I'm still bitter now.
pay per minute Internet access (pre-0800)
At one point I had a flat-rate Home Highway (BT ISDN) setup - two channels bonded to a MASSIVE 128k of always-on internet feed. And, since I was with Demon, I had a real internet IP address.
Ah those were the carefree days when having a firewall wasn't an imperative!
“ Other bits and pieces include the shunting of the venerable SendMail to the /extra directory in favour of Postfix, and the retirement of imapd and ipop3d, which are being replaced by the Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server.”
Setting sendmail up with my demon account was a nightmare back in the day.
> Setting sendmail up with my demon account was a nightmare back in the day.
I connected in to Demon from HP-UX before using Linux, this was before even Slackware and the out of the box CF file worked fine. Well it did when the person in the lab didn't try to patch it by cutting and pasting in some new lines without realising that expanding tabs to spaces breaks the file Duh!
I did not download Slackware over wet string dial up modem and install it from punched cards floppies back in the Edwardian era early 90s. I started using Slackware in 2014 with 14.1.
You get a large system (compilers, build tools, server stacks and databases and so forth, scripting, document preparation tools) and a full desktop with applications. Most applications are supplied as released by the upstream project, often with full documentation.
This base is maintained by PV with input from the wider team with updates made available. You get to decide if and when to install them. There is no automation (unless you add it), the system is configured mostly with scripts in /etc. I even understand a few of them.
No drama, works for me.
I first ran Mandrake Linux on a spare 486 I had, and it ran lovely. I had heard about Slackware so I bought a new hard disk to swap out with the main Windows drive I was running and tried it on that (scared of messing up Windows). After 6 months of using it I realised I hadn't put the Windows drive back in in for ages, so thought 'bollocks' and used the used that disc as a slave HDB drive for Slackware.
I have since been running it on my two old laptop and also have 2 Pi's running Slackware. - that's 19 years and still the best! Also so easy to build your own kernels.
Best distro ever! I will be updating my laptop's when the Wife's at work later this week.
Slackware on the Pi:
In my experience (just a regular user that was sick of Microsoft's BS and wanted a better option) systemd was the one bringing unpredictability, sometimes taking several minutes to shut down, because it was waiting for $DEITY knows what. I do not remember the details, it was years ago.
Yes I tried to fix it, googled the damn thing and at the end I just decided to nuke it from orbit, there, problem fixed.
Again: I wasn't a Pro IT practitioner cursing its guts because I had to work with it, or even a power user, I was just a regular user expecting his laptop to shut down when instructed.
systemd may wait to shut down or reboot, generally 1.5 minutes if you're logged in from another computer on the local network. Or it may wait for some other reason (which I can't remember now but it's happened). Really, that's my main gripe with systemd now, slowing down rebooting.
Perhaps there is a setting to control this behaviour.
I read about Slackware with great enthusiasm and read quite a bit about the installation etc. Thought OK I'm going to see how much it costs to buy the supported distro on CD. Unfortunatley the web site is MIA (missing in action).
First Firefox and Brave give "Secure Connection Failed" message even though the url is https.
Brave eventually says, "This site can't be reached".
Not a good advert for the OS. I hope things improve.
ALF
Just while we are swapping obscure mirrors...
http://www.slackware.no/
These people do a 32bit build of the full *current* install iso each Tuesday. NB it isn't hybrid. You have to burn it to an optical disk.
(Both the main ones are going fine from here as well as slackware.uk and mirrorservice.)
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